[D66] Red Neoliberals: How Corbyn’s Victory Unmasked Britain’s Guardian

Tue Sep 22 09:17:04 CEST 2015

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Erik vdMb

Le 22 sept. 2015 à 09:10, "J.N." <jugg at ziggo.nl> a écrit :

> "should there not be a section for media war crimes at the
> Hague?"
> 
> http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/21/red-neoliberals-how-corbyns-victory-unmasked-britains-guardian/
> 
> September 21, 2015
> Red Neoliberals: How Corbyn’s Victory Unmasked Britain’s Guardian
> 
> by Jonathan Cook
> 
> In autumn 2002 Ed Vulliamy, a correspondent for Britain’s Sunday
> Observer newspaper, stumbled on a terrible truth that many of us already
> suspected.
> 
> In a world-exclusive, he persuaded Mel Goodman, a former senior Central
> Intelligence Agency official who still had security clearance, to go on
> record that the CIA knew there were no WMD in Iraq. Everything the US
> and British governments were telling us to justify the coming attack on
> Iraq were lies.
> 
> Then something even more extraordinary happened. The Observer failed to
> print the story.
> 
> In his book Flat Earth News, Nick Davies recounts that Vulliamy, one of
> the Observer’s most trusted reporters, submitted the piece another six
> times in different guises over the next half year. Each time the
> Observer spiked the story.
> 
> Vulliamy never went public with this monumental crime against real
> journalism (should there not be a section for media war crimes at the
> Hague?). The supposedly liberal-left Observer was never held accountable
> for the grave betrayal of its readership and the world community.
> 
> But at the weekend maybe the tables turned a little. The Observer gave
> Vulliamy a platform in its comment pages to take issue with an editorial
> the previous week savaging Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour Party leader.
> 
> In understandably cautious mode, Vulliamy called the paper’s stance
> towards Corbyn “churlish”, warning that it had lost the chance to stand
> apart from the rest of the British media. All had taken vehemently
> against the new Labour leader from the very beginning of his candidacy.
> 
>    “we conjoined the chorus with our own – admittedly more progressive
> – version of this obsession with electoral strategy with little regard
> to what Corbyn says about the principles of justice, peace and equality
> (or less inequality).”
> 
> What do these two confrontations between Vulliamy and the Observer –13
> years apart; one public, one not – indicate about the changing status of
> the liberal-left media?
> 
> To understand what’s going on, we also need to consider the coverage of
> Corbyn in the Guardian, the better-known daily sister paper of the Observer.
> 
> All the Guardian’s inner circle of commentators, from Jonathan Freedland
> to Polly Toynbee, made public that they were dead against Corbyn from
> the moment he looked likely to win. When he served simply to justify
> claims that the Labour Party was a broad and tolerant church, these
> commentators were in favour of his standing. But as soon as he began to
> surge ahead, these same liberal-left pundits poured more scorn on him
> than they had reserved for any other party leader in living memory.
> 
> In a few months Corbyn has endured more contempt from the fearless
> watchdogs of the left than the current Conservative prime minister,
> David Cameron, has suffered over many years.
> 
> The Guardian’s news coverage, meanwhile, followed exactly the same
> antagonistic formula as that of the rightwing press: ignore the policy
> issues raised by Corbyn, concentrate on trivial or perceived personality
> flaws, and frame stories about him in establishment-friendly ways.
> 
> We have endured in the Guardian the same patently ridiculous,
> manufactured reports about Corbyn, portraying him as sexist,
> anti-semitic, unpatriotic, and much more.
> 
> We could expect the rightwing media to exploit every opportunity to try
> to discredit Corbyn, but looking at the talkbacks it was clear Guardian
> readers expected much more from their paper than simple-minded character
> assassination.
> 
> Red neoliberals
> 
> The reality is that Corbyn poses a very serious challenge to supposedly
> liberal-left media like the Guardian and the Observer, which is why they
> hoped to ensure his candidacy was still-born and why, now he is leader,
> they are caught in a terrible dilemma.
> 
> While the Guardian and Observer market themselves as committed to
> justice and equality, but do nothing to bring them about apart from
> promoting tinkering with the present, hugely unjust, global neoliberal
> order, Corbyn’s rhetoric suggests that the apple cart needs upending.
> 
> If it achieves nothing else, Corbyn’s campaign has highlighted a truth
> about the existing British political system: that, at least since the
> time of Tony Blair, the country’s two major parliamentary parties have
> been equally committed to upholding neoliberalism. The Blue Neoliberal
> Party (the Conservatives) and the Red Neoliberal Party (Labour) mark the
> short horizon of current British politics. You can have either hardcore
> neoliberalism or slightly more softcore neoliberalism.
> 
> Corbyn shows that there should be more to politics than this false
> choice, which is why hundreds of thousands of leftists flocked back to
> Labour in the hope of getting him elected. In doing so, they overwhelmed
> the parliamentary Labour party (PLP), which vigorously opposed him
> becoming leader.
> 
> But where does this leave the Guardian and Observer, both of which have
> consistently backed “moderate” elements in the PLP? If Corbyn is
> exposing the PLP as the Red Neoliberal Party, what does that mean for
> the Guardian, the parliamentary party’s house paper?
> 
> Corbyn is not just threatening to expose the sham of the PLP as a real
> alternative to the Conservatives, but the sham of Britain’s liberal-left
> media as a real alternative to the press barons. Which is why the
> Freedlands and Toynbees – keepers of the Guardian flame, of its
> undeserved reputation as the left’s moral compass – demonstrated such
> instant antipathy to his sudden rise to prominence.
> 
> They and the paper followed the rightwing media in keeping the focus
> resolutely on Corbyn rather than recognising the obvious truth: this was
> about much more than one individual. The sudden outpouring of support
> for Corbyn reflected both an embrace of his authenticity and principles
> and a much more general anger at the injustices, inequalities and
> debasement of public life brought about by neoliberalism.
> 
> Corbyn captured a mood, one that demands real, not illusory change. He
> is riding a wave, and to discredit Corbyn is to discredit that wave.
> 
> Character assassination
> 
> The Guardian and the Observer, complicit for so long with the Red
> Neoliberals led by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, thought
> they could kill off Corbyn’s campaign by joining in the general media
> bullying. They thought they could continue to police the boundaries of
> the political left – of what counts as credible on the left – and place
> Corbyn firmly outside those borders.
> 
> But he won even so – and with an enormous lead over his rivals. In
> truth, the Guardian’s character assassination of Corbyn, rather than
> discrediting him, served only to discredit the paper with its own readers.
> 
> Corbyn’s victory represented a huge failure not just for the political
> class in all its narrow neoliberal variations, but also for the media
> class in all its narrow neoliberal variations. It was a sign that the
> Guardian’s credibility with its own readers is steadily waning.
> 
> The talkback sections in the Guardian show its kneejerk belittling of
> Corbyn has inserted a dangerous seed of doubt in the minds of a
> proportion of its formerly loyal readers. Many of those hundreds of
> thousands of leftists who joined the Labour party either to get Corbyn
> elected or to demonstrate their support afterwards are Guardian readers
> or potential readers. And the Guardian and Observer ridiculed them and
> their choice.
> 
> Belatedly the two papers are starting to sense their core readership
> feels betrayed. Vulliamy’s commentary should be seen in that light. It
> is not a magnanimous gesture by the Observer, or even an indication of
> its commitment to pluralism. It is one of the early indications of a
> desperate damage limitation operation.
> 
> We are likely to see more such “reappraisals” in the coming weeks, as
> the liberal-left media tries to salvage its image with its core readers.
> 
> This may not prove a fatal blow to the Guardian or the Observer but it
> is a sign of an accelerating trend for the old media generally and the
> liberal-left media more specifically.
> 
> Papers like the Guardian and the Observer no longer understand their
> readerships both because they no longer have exclusive control of their
> readers’ perceptions of what is true and because the reality – not
> least, polarising inequality and climate degradation – is becoming ever
> more difficult to soft-soap.
> 
> Media like the Guardian are tied by a commercial and ideological
> umbilical cord to a neoliberal order a large swath of their readers are
> growing restless with or feel downright appalled by.
> 
> In 2003 the Observer knowingly suppressed the truth about Iraq and WMD
> to advance the case for an illegal, “preventive” war, one defined in
> international law as the supreme war crime.
> 
> At that time – digitally the equivalent of the Dark Ages compared to now
> – the paper just about managed to get away with its complicity in a
> crime against humanity. The Observer never felt the need to make real
> amends with Vulliamy or the readers it betrayed.
> 
> But in the age of a burgeoning new media, the Observer and Guardian are
> discovering that the rules are shifting dangerously under their feet.
> Corbyn is a loud messenger of that change.
> 
> Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His
> latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and
> the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing
> Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His
> website is www.jkcook.net.
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